A Poet of Belief

Vijay Seshadri’s second book, “The Long Meadow,” was published this May, and won the James Laughlin Award, presented by the Academy of American Poets. Six poems from the book were originally published in The New Yorker, including “The Disappearances,” “North of Manhattan,” and “The Long Meadow.” Here Seshadri, who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and is a 2004 Guggenheim Fellow, talks with The New Yorker’s poetry editor, Alice Quinn, about the creative process and the poets who have influenced him the most.

ALICE QUINN: Could you talk a little about the role of dialogue, of people’s voices, in your poems?

VIJAY SESHADRI: I like channelling voices because I have a very clear idea of the characters behind them. With “Interview,” for example, I had an idea of someone like Bob Costas, the sports announcer, but more resentful. And with “Lecture” I knew exactly who this art historian was who was giving the lecture and referring to the slides of the artist’s work. So I think of myself, to a certain extent, as a poet who does voices, which I think is a pretty orthodox way of going about writing, and has been since the modernists. Eliot comes to mind—wasn’t the title of “The Waste Land” at one point “He Do the Police in Different Voices”? I feel comfortable writing like that.

Do those bits of talk come to you in a flash, more or less?

I think I start with a rhythmic principle, a rhythmic shape. I cannot start with an idea. I have to start with a line that has the vocal qualities of the human voice embedded in it. And it has to have a certain amount of snap. But it’s interesting how many voices are within us, and how many different kinds of personalities we can actually inhabit. Art seems to be the only place we can liberate our many selves.

I also think that if you can get the conversational tone in anything, whether it’s the conversation of an imagined character or your own conversation, or the representation of your own conversation—because, with poetry, it’s always a little bit different from the way one actually speaks—then you’ve done a lot of the work of the poem before the poem is fully started. You’ve set up a contract between yourself and the reader.

And in this way you also give a little access to the big picture, to a sense of bustle and cosmos.

Sure. In “North of Manhattan,” I wanted to represent, not extensively but briefly and emphatically, the vocal variety of New York. And New York is, of course, a cosmos rather than a mere city. That poem was a pleasure to write, by the way. I came off the Cross-County Parkway onto Kimball Avenue, in Yonkers, one morning, and I was waiting at the light to make a left turn and go to my office at Sarah Lawrence, and I saw the Dyre Avenue bus. The sign on the front said, “Dyre Avenue—To the Subway.” And from there, making the turn and going the five hundred yards to my office, I must have written the first twenty to twenty-five lines of the poem in my head. It took all of about two minutes. When I got to my office, I immediately wrote it down. The first quarter of the poem tumbled out, and then I had some work to do for the rest of it.

Many of your opening lines are funny—for instance, “Arriving early at the limit of understanding, I managed to find a good seat.”

There is a satiric element in my poetry. I don’t think it’s a major element, but a lot of people have said that these poems are funny.

It’s a technical issue, too. Technical issues are actually just masks for things that are fundamental to one’s own psyche. It is in my nature that if I make a large statement such as “Arriving early at the limit of understanding”—that’s a huge statement, right?—I’m going to find a way to undercut it rather than go any farther into it and try to do what, say, Rilke did. Rilke would start there, and he would move directly to the sublime. But I could never, ever, in a million years, not feel tremendous irony, and a certain shyness, and a feeling of being abashed, if I continued in that way.

So the turns in my poems are often ironic, and in certain cases dismissive. But those are just rhetorical strategies. It’s not that I don’t trust big statements, or that I’m unwilling to pursue them any farther than I do, or seem to, but if you tend to be an ironic poet (and person), like I am, and filled with all these refractions and hesitations, you have to employ those things. They’re crucial to your psyche. I think Elizabeth Bishop is very, very good for poets who are a little shy. They should always read her, because she makes her shyness, her naturalness, her “modesty,” into this tremendous metaphysical force.

Can you talk about Whitman’s place in your life as a poet?

“North of Manhattan,” even though it has a title that recalls Robert Frost, is a poem written in the shadow of Whitman. It has lists; it is concerned with Whitman’s spiritual location, the city of New York. It responds to the city, and looks at the same thing Whitman looked at: the fecundity of life in the city, its overwhelming plenitude, which in Whitman is usually, but not always, glorious, at least in Whitman’s work prior to his experience of the Civil War. In “North of Manhattan,” that plenitude is seen as energetic and vital, but also as destructive. There is a way in which I am looking through that poem to Whitman, and arguing with him.

I’m always amazed by Whitman. I’m amazed, especially, by the delicacy of his technique—remarkably delicate and precise, and this in someone who has been thought of, historically, as massive and powerful. He has a control over the minutiae of poetry that is of the same order as Emily Dickinson’s. You can just marvel and marvel at the little effects, and the little changes.

Ultimately, though, all that stuff is ancillary to the great challenge for me in Whitman, the challenge I’ve never really been able to rise to, which is that of the visionary life and the prophetic experience, mystical and prophetic. I feel close to mysticism, and know those experiences, but I’ve never managed to put that in my work. Whitman’s so big, and I always feel, when reading him, Gosh, shouldn’t I be trying to do that, shouldn’t I be trying to get there, isn’t that what it’s all about? But how can you get there?

Was “The Long Meadow” a poem that came to you quickly?

Yes. I had been ruminating, a little bit prior to writing the poem, on an incident in the Mahabharata, the Sanskrit epic poem, an incident that I appropriate and distort radically in “The Long Meadow.” I took that as a starting-off point, and worked the poem very quickly to the turn at the end from the mythological to the quotidian. That turn was really the generative idea in the poem. I knew at some point that I was going to make a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn—that was the inspiration—and the composition of the poem had to do with a establishing a tone and a relationship between what I was relating and how I was relating it which had to be designed to make that turn possible.

So you’ve studied the way a poem can swivel.

Yes, I’ve looked at that in a lot of poetry, and have found examples of that kind of swivelling—not, maybe, as radical, but pretty emphatic nonetheless—scattered throughout poetry, so I don’t think it was new with me. But what really attracted me was the possibility of conveying meaning by an element that was purely structural. It’s really in the relationship between the parts that are linked by the turn in the poem that the real meaning of the poem lies. The poem is not about the cosmic drama that it relates in the first part, nor is it about the domestic drama of the anticlimax. It’s about the relationship between the two. And managing that relation, making the relation the poem, was something I had never been able to do before, and I was very happy. It’s not often that you get an opportunity to manage an idea in that way.

I had a wonderful sense of liberation after I wrote that poem. I felt that I’d really done it. That sense went away, of course, but it was great for a while.

Many poets say that the line that initially comes to them as the first ends up as the penultimate or last line. Do your first lines usually remain first?

I don’t really move things around very much, because I write mostly in my head—probably because I’ve always been working and doing other stuff. I’ve never been sitting down and saying, “Well, I’m going to write today.” So certain habits have developed that involve my being with the poem in my mind long before I’m with the poem on the page.

Your Indian background comes in at the end of “North of Manhattan,” with “the tree that the bulbul loves.” The rich tapestry of Indian mythology is prevalent in your inner weather, isn’t it?

In my early inner weather and in my much later inner weather, but nothing in between. India exists in my work because I was told those stories, those Indian myths and episodes from the great narrative poems, when I was a small child. Children are told those stories in India to this day; they’re a part of everyday life. And they are a part of my consciousness. I refamiliarized myself with the texts when I was in my late twenties and early thirties. I went to Pakistan and lived there and studied Urdu poetry, which is where “bulbul” comes from, and not, originally, from an Indian tradition. Bulbul is an Arabic word that comes into Indian languages through Persian. And, of course, it’s the word for “nightingale,” the mythopoetic bird. That’s a connection that people unfamiliar with the word won’t make, but it was one that I was thinking of. So the poem, at the end, is about poetry in some way.

It was rather amazing that we had your poem “The Disappearances” on hand to publish, on its own page, in the weeks following September 11, 2001, and even more amazing to me to learn that you wrote it just two months before the attack. Weren’t you astonished that the composition of that poem almost collided with the catastrophe?

More than anything else, I was baffled that I had somehow fixed on the one prior civic disaster of that magnitude in my lifetime, that I had gone back to the Kennedy assassination, the one comparable moment. It was very strange.

I wrote the poem in July. I had been thinking about memory, and about writing a memoir. And it just so happened that I heard the news from my mother that Mrs. Chess, the woman who was our next-door neighbor at the time of the Kennedy assassination (who, in the poem, says, “Hush, children! Don’t you understand history is being made?”), was sick with cancer. The most vivid memories I have of her involve that weekend when President Kennedy was shot and died and the funeral took place. But I wrote the poem not as a narrative of that moment but as an examination of the feeling, in some way—not merely the feeling of the moment but the feeling that comes from trying to recover the feeling of the moment.

There are these broken perceptions and hesitations and incomplete actions—none of them having a narrative associated with them. They’re glimpses, and they create rhythmic pressure as the reader moves down the page. The poem is like a slow immersion in a hot bath, inch by inch. You put one toe in and then you go in deeper, you go in a little deeper, and you pull back a little bit.

There’s a picture, and another picture, and another. And they culminate in what Mrs. Chess says: “Hush, children! Don’t you understand history is being made?” And that allows for the release of the tension in the poem. That becomes the point at which the energies of the poem are liberated and expand outward.

I’m so haunted by the phrase “the dispeopled bedroom community,” which manages to deftly summon up other words with that prefix—“disappointment,” “distraught,” “disengaged.” Where did you come upon that word?

I think I made it up. Those are just the happy inventions of poetry that you can never afterward account for. And you can’t really question them too much, because they’re mysterious. They come from outside yourself.

Could you say a few words about the memoir of your father and your family, which you’ve placed at the center of your new book? There you mention how strange your family was in Ohio, but you say that you were the only person in the family “beset and burdened by this strangeness.”

One of the things that I would have to say about Indianness, or my being Indian, is that, whatever else it was, it wasn’t, when I was growing up, social. What I mean by that is that it wasn’t collective. It was unique to us as a family, and unique to me as a child in my family. We were effectively the only Indians in Columbus, Ohio—there might have been one or two other families, since it was a university town, and there were graduate students, but almost everybody else in the world I lived in was white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. So the experience was one of strangeness.

Difference is interesting for the poet because it’s dramatic. Strangeness is interesting for the poet because it gives him or her the opportunity for drama, whether it’s the strangeness of the poet or the strangeness of the world around the poet.

My race is certainly central to my life, as is India, but I was also a creature of the nineteen-sixties, and that’s been a huge thing. It has shaped my consciousness and my attitudes, and is an experience that I share with people who come from very different backgrounds who went through the period of Vietnam and the civil-rights movement and all of that. I feel that the inner experience I had was racial and Indian, but it was also the inner experience of mid-century America. I remember those things.

Can you talk about poetic influence a bit more?

The great influence on the lyric poems in the book is Blake. I’ve thought about him the most, and in many different ways. And I’m always so excited by him. Blake had this epic scope and imagination, and he could do things on a very big scale, but when he got down into the details, into the miniaturizations, into the cellular level, he was just as strong, just as powerful, very much, of course, like Whitman. But the guy was nuts, too, right? So maybe one can’t reach that far without having a certain sort of insanity. It’s something I crave, though—that multiplicity, that variety. And I suspect that if you think about Dickinson in a certain way, if you look at the whole project rather than just at individual poems, she has that same quality. She has epic scope, too. There’s something additive, accretive, to the work—and there’s a project above the project that we see in the actual poems.

In your essay about going to Pakistan in 1989, you talked about being propelled by a desire to involve yourself in what you perceived as some of the real problems of the world. Since September 11th, I feel that a number of poets have been able to help people—not by forcing their gift in an antiwar direction but just by reflecting the moment in which we find ourselves.

I would like to be finishing a book of prose I’m writing, but I’m always turning to poems because they’re the only way I can resolve all this stuff that’s happening, which assaults one, which one cannot escape from. “The Long Meadow” was, for me, a kind of release. I was feeling very desperate about the state of the world, and it really helped me, helped me get out of the state of despair I was in at that moment.

In your memoir, you describe yourself as a nine-year-old boy in the back seat of the car on family trips to visit Civil War sites, and you speak of your “flourishing skepticism.” Do you think your skeptical temperament serves you well in your poems?

I think it’s useful, but, like any attitude or stance, its usefulness is limited. In some sense, skepticism, just like ardor or passion, can only and always get you to the point where you have to relinquish it. Passionate poets who don’t relinquish their passion at some point never get to the poem, either. They get swirled away at the last moment by their own ardor. And skepticism is like that, too. I think the ultimate poem is a poem of belief. A poem of faith. And in some sense, even when you have a bitter, tragic poem, faith is expressed simply in the full recognition of the tragic element.♦

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